Apple sued by HTC over three new patents

HTC has filed a new lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company infringes on three patents it holds, two of which were acquired with the purchase of ADC Technologies back in April. Filed in the US District Court in Delaware, Reuters reports, HTC claims that not only iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, but iPods and Macs use the IP without permission. HTC is looking for damages, triple damages for willful infringement, and an injunction on importation and sales of the allegedly infringing devices.

This is my next dug up the relevant patents, which include 7,417,944 “Method for orderwire modulation”, 7,672,219 “Multipoint-to-point communication using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing” and 7,765,414 “Circuit and operating method for integrated interface of PDA and wireless communication system”; the first two were acquired from ADC while HTC itself filed the latter. Meanwhile, the S3 Graphics patents Apple has already been found to be infringing upon are likely to form the next salvo in HTC’s attack, presuming the purchase is approved.

HTC tells us that it won’t comment specifically on this new suit, and that “we don’t comment on pending litigation.” However, the company does say that “as a leading smartphone innovator, we respect intellectual property of others and will defend our own intellectual property as needed.” Apple is yet to comment.

Update: HTC comments on the suit:

“We are taking this action against Apple to protect our intellectual property, our industry partners, and most importantly our customers that use HTC phones. This is the 3rd case before the ITC in which Apple is infringing our intellectual property. Apple needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its products.” Grace Lei, general counsel, HTC Corporation